We’re obsessed with the president
For most people, we are about as far away from election season as any other time in our 4-year gauntlet of family members arguing and coalescing around one of the two major political parties on facebook. About 25% of the population, however, has been paying a bit more attention, and has figured out the date of the presidential primary –the elections that decide presidential candidates. If they happen to live in Iowa or New Hampshire, they may have even cast their vote in it.
But as the talking heads of highest office once again ramp up their discourse, there have also been at least 6 major elections between now and then: midterms, off-cycle elections, and respective primary elections for each. Almost all of which (with the exception of the general midterm election) have had an even lower turnout than ongoing presidential primaries.
Certainly, you’re familiar with the name of the President of the United States. But, do you know who represents you in your state’s legislature? Do you know your city’s mayor (or does your city even have one)? Do you even know what kinds of duties these people perform? And, if you are one of the few who votes in these elections annually, do you know if you are voting for the county council member, school district director, or port commissioner that best represents your interests?
Most of us don’t. And the issue we should all have with this is that these less buzz-worthy elections are the contests that actually have a significant impact on our lives. Presidential candidates may lie, but they would never be caught saying “I’m going to fix all the roads in your neighborhood” or “I’m going to build a bigger subway system in Seattle”. Though they may mention something generally about infrastructure or public transit, those issues are unique to the locations they belong to, issues unique to your life. Presidential candidates focus on general issues like international affairs, gun control, abortion, and immigration. These issues make it easy to aggregate you as a voter into a bloc where you’ll take whatever bare-minimum leadership the two-party system gives you. These elections may be important, but they also distract us from a common wisdom: that meaningful change happens at a community level.
The leaders who find themselves running for these large-scale positions are far from community built; often sponsored by hundreds of corporate interest groups. The last 4-year general election cycle was the most expensive yet with a combined 14.4 billion. Only a handful of people exist in the world with a net worth that could cover such an expense.
But beyond sheer numbers, there is a more insidious holistic outlook of this trend. Our inability to mobilize for smaller elections is essentially surrendering leadership decisions that matter to centralized systems of control which are either incompetent or unwilling to affect our quality of lives in any meaningful way. Whether the deliberate intention is there or not, individual people like you are taken advantage of by a system of governance that naturally puts the interests of hierarchical overlords over the interests of the people who may be a part of them. The people who work for Google in Washington vs the people who work for Google in Florida almost certainly have different needs for governance. But only Google’s parent company, Alphabet, can afford to make million dollar donations in these elections, and Google’s needs are far more general (and irrelevant) then the needs of every day Floridans and Washingtonians. And for tech companies and wealthy politicians alike, controlling the wide-net outcome of a few elections is a lot easier than controlling the outcome of many smaller ones. That is to say: there appears to be an corporate incentive for power to consolidate at the highest level of government, even if such a distribution of power wouldn’t be in the best interest of the people who the government is supposedly for.
But here we are again. Another election cycle is formulating and you should absolutely exercise your duty as part of a democratic system to influence that outcome. But while the people on the podiums for those elections bicker, echoing the dinner table arguments of extended family members over the same subjects (subjects which are laughably out of their control), why not first consider the real issues? Who’s on my ballot? What even is a “county assessor”, and what does voting for any of these people mean for me and my community? Forget the ads. It’s the names on the ballot we forget about that matter the most. Democracy –rule by the people, only works if we actually take some level of initiative to participate in it. The president, your congressmen, and your mayor are not messianic leaders with visionary grand plans of a better America for you. They are just pulling the rigging of the sails running this thing. So, if we can’t even take rulership over ourselves, who else is going to steer the ship?
